My Field Of Dreams

Welcome back, the sky is dark again, and so I've gone in search of some solace. No no, the company is good, come sit down. I've brought some treats, a few little bits of tortilla chips and some salsa, enjoy. One of the things I love most about this place is how it lets me travel through my own mind and soul, using words and mental images to convey the things that push and haunt me. It's good to take this time to just sit back and think, which is why I want to share this. You see I mentioned this person before, and he's a rather remarkable person, and so I'll share this little bit of writing about something that occured half a lifetime ago.

My Field of Dreams

The smells, the sights, and the sounds, there are so many things that make me think of the old field behind Martin Collegiate. It is the first place I was ever tested, physically and mentally, and the first place I proved I could grow up to be a good man. I have often said that without the experience I had in football while I was in high school I would be dead or in jail now. I can close my eyes and picture it, feel it under my feet, and it is like going home. Ugly and brutal but beautiful in my mind for what I gave and what I got.

Shaped like an ‘L’ the long side holds the slightly raised field. The grass is dying from repeated running and bad drainage, and I’m sure the gophers who call the field home are not helping the growth. The field turns around a fenced in tennis court, and in the far northwest corner is the baseball diamond, but that is another world. On the short southwest side is the soccer field, also raised like the football field, but perhaps better cared for. No gopher holes and the grass is holding up a bit better, but still bare patches outnumber the solid green.

The smell varies, but always carries that loamy bare earth scent. On the hot dry days it carries the aroma of drying and dying grass, like hay but weaker and sad in its impotence. When it rains you can barely catch the scent of new growth, mainly you smell the rain, that wet yet dusty smell that permeates Saskatchewan after one of its flash storms. Gathered amongst this I remember the smell of the equipment, old sweat and hard work captured in the layers; the faint smell of the passing cars, like a strange invasion from some other world that was best ignored.

Oh but the sounds, those things made it what it was to me. Shouted commands, at first from my fellow teammates as we warmed up, replaced by coaches taking their own time to mold us, make us a unit designed to fight a specific type of battle. The thudding of feet, heavy harsh breathing with the occasional grunt was the most regular sounds as the linemen held their conditioning court on the soccer field, running lap after lap. The crash of bodies and equipment when the tests became physical and you matched your skill and strength against another. Most of all the screams stick in my head; they had such range. There were shouts of triumph as one bested another in one on one competition. There were cries of surprise and anguish as a particular test got the better of someone. Grunts of pain as bodies smashed into each other with brutal force. Cadence: Down! Set! HUT HUT HUT! All the sounds would mix after that.

This description gives no justice to the true nature of what happened on that field: the lessons that were felt and learned. I doubt many of my teammates ever were as introspective as I am about it, but I don’t doubt they too were as deeply affected. Strange things happened to me on that field and those are the truly important matters to describe.

The first week was hell. I was a bigger than normal kid who listened to his uncle: ‘Go play football.’ I had no idea what I was getting into. I puked twice that first week, I’d never worked so hard in my life. I was taunted, ridiculed, yelled at. The urge to quit was strong; my stubborn nature to prove them wrong was stronger. I was drilled on the sled over and over, made to do push ups along with my fellow linemen until I got it right. Screamed at by my teammates because they suffered with me when the drill was done wrong. I never fought back. I was new, I was a freshman, I didn’t know anything, I was scared, but I was also determined, and just mean enough to want them to chew on their words. I wanted that chance to make them eat every shouted insult, preferably because I smashed it down their throats.

The first chance I got was that first one on one. I had to block this behemoth of a nose tackle, Steve Uhren. I remember seeing stars, and I remember getting up off my back. Beyond that I was sure I did everything wrong and I knew I was going to quit. I was dusting myself off as the head coach came towards me, and I was sure there was to be some conciliatory remark about how I was the rookie, and he was a vet. Instead a large hard grabbed my face mask, and these words were burned into my brain: ‘Wrong! You fire off the count! You pump your feet! You make contact, you don’t allow contact! Do it again!’ I was tossed back to the monster that had destroyed me and forced to do it again. I lost again, but this time I hit rather than being hit, before Steve used a simple swim technique to dump me on my face. ‘Better,’ was grudgingly grunted at me from the sidelines, and I took my place amongst my fellow linemen.

I didn’t quit, because obviously there was a purpose to this. There was a lesson to be learned. My 14 year old brain didn’t grasp that but something in me burned to learn it just the same. I kept going, and I kept trying and I gave everything I had to get better. I recall my own mother looking at me with concern, pity, and confusion when I came home from practice every day that first year. I was bruised, beaten, and sore. I came home, ate like a horse, did some homework and went to sleep. I guess I’m lucky she saw what I couldn’t, the lesson that needed to be learned.

Four years I spent in the trenches of high school football. Four years I spent every off season working out, playing every other sport I could to stay in shape for football, and every spring and fall I would then turn myself over to that field behind Martin Collegiate, and sacrifice both my body and soul to it. I had caught religion and it saved me, Praise the First Down!

When I graduated from high school, I was an honor roll student, a letterman from the many sports I played in, I was named an all star in my grade 11 year for football, and after the Senior Bowl, named to the top four hundred graduating high school football players. I was even scouted by McGill to play football there.

If the lesson hasn’t been made perfectly clear yet I should explain. I get lost in these thoughts and I don’t know if anyone else understands them like I do because I’m sure some would look at these words and be shocked at the abuses, the physical punishment I put my body through, and think I suffered something akin to Stockholm Syndrome. That’s not it.

I only have one signature in my Grade 12 yearbook. It’s from one of the few Heroes I’ve had in my life. It is simple, and direct, and is one of the tenants of my life. ‘Real Men get back Up. –Coach Saip’ He was my head coach, the one who yelled at me after that first one on one. One of the few people to ever tell me I could do better, and show me how. The lesson I learned on that field was one that guides me today. Nothing is ever over unless you let it be over. Shame doesn’t come from losing, it doesn’t come from failure. It comes from not trying your best, and it comes from not continuing to try. If you don’t learn why you failed then you won’t ever fire off that line.

That field saved my life. I wasn’t much of a person until I laid myself bare on that dying grass and bare dirt. I close my eyes sometimes, when life is hard, and I’m pretty sure getting back up one more time just isn’t worth it, and I picture that field. I picture what it looks like. On the really hard times, when my life has been nothing but pain and failure, I go there still and just lean up against the blocking sled, and listen, smell and look. It comes back, that spirit that filled me there, that religion that made me more than a punk kid heading for jail or an early grave. I get back up.